Faerie -- part 1

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I’ve just started re-reading John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, which is beautifully written, and it got me thinking about fairies and fairy tales—and writing.

If you haven’t read the book, it’s something that, described at a distance, seems almost trite, because so many people have done this kind of thing: a boy fascinated by fairy tales slides sideways into their world, where there are monsters and kings and kind woodsmen and all that, where you never leave the path and so forth. In the process, he finds ways to grow up and become his own person. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But it’s not, partly because it’s remarkably inventive, and mostly because it’s so beautifully written.

The thing is, I think the representation of fairies (elves, fae, whatever) in fantasy fiction tends to be remarkably uninteresting. I can think of very few works of classic fantasy in which they’re both convincing and really interesting. As an example, Tolkien’s elves are mostly just very, very old people who apparently like to sing songs a lot. Legolas just isn’t all that interesting a person, frankly, and neither is Elrond. Galadriel is a good deal weirder, but Celeborn is a complete stick. I recognize that Tolkien had an entire history and language (actually more than one) for the elves, and that we only get glimpses of this in The Lord of the Rings, but nevertheless in the book as published the elves just aren’t all that great. Interesting, kind of, but not convincing—in the sense that they’re not convincingly different from humans.

Then there are all the zillions of pseudo-Celtic fantasies with elves and so forth, who mostly seem like Tolkien knockoffs. There are moments in C. J. Cherryh’s Dreaming Tree duology (The Dreamstone and The Tree of Swords and Jewels) at which the Sidhe seem convincingly Other, but it’s all kind of overwritten and heavy-handed (although I admit I was quite into them when I was young).

Then there are the various “fairy tales in real life” takes, of which Neil Gaiman’s various concoctions are these days probably the best known. In Gaiman, fairies are more strikingly weird, which is good, but I don’t find them all that interesting. I think the problem is that if Faerie (the place) is sufficiently bizarre, and controlled by utterly arbitrary rules that nobody can explain because they’re completely normal and obvious to the Fae themselves, then we can’t really understand anything and it’s just one bit of weirdness after another.

Connolly’s book is one very big exception. The fairy-tale world is built of fairy tales, in such a way that it’s the logic of the tales and not the creatures that carries the day. There’s very little sense of how this could actually function as a world unto itself, because it functions as stories, which is not the same thing as a world. It doesn’t always work, but most of it does, and it’s stitched together by such lovely writing and by a convincing sense of both otherness and pressure that it ends up an exceptional book. If you haven’t read it, check it out.

Another take on fairies that I can recall impressing me strongly, as a piece of writerly invention, is Jack Vance’s Lyonesse. We don’t visit Faerie all that often, but when we do, there is a powerful wind of otherness, a kind of whimsical-and-yet-deadly-serious gamesmanship, that carries the thing effectively. Part of what makes this work, actually, is that the Faerie sections are incidental, not at all the focus of the books, and so we’re left with a strong sense that there’s an enormous amount more to say… but we never actually know. Maybe he pulled it off by just writing a surface, sort of the radical opposite of Tolkien’s infinite back-construction, and maybe again Vance actually had volumes of notes. Whichever way it was, Faerie is deeply weird, frightening, humorous, and strongly reminiscent of a lot of fairy tales without ever quite walking the plotline of any tales you remember.

But the BIG exception, the one that breaks every mold, is John Crowley’s Little, Big. The fairies are so utterly alien, and yet somehow so familiar (without being remotely comprehensible), that they’re mesmerizing. The main plotline, which is a family history spanning the very late 19th century through somewhere around 2000, is full of very ordinary people we end up caring about tremendously. And the writing! Crowley is one of the finest writers working today, in my considered opinion, and I remember being struck to find that Harold Bloom agreed about this. I’ve read the novel several times, and there’s one moment late in the book which I see coming, understand everything happening, and yet every single time I find myself in tears—it’s just that agonizingly painful. It’s not a book for young readers, by which I mean really anyone under 30, but grownups—especially parents—will find it extraordinarily powerful. I keep thinking I should write one of these column things about Crowley, but every time I start thinking about it seriously, I realize what an enormous task it is. And Little, Big is a masterpiece. If you haven’t read it, I envy you: you have a life-altering experience ahead of you.

My current plan for the next column is to do some meditation about Faerie and the potential ways of representing it, as opposed to this sketch-list of examples. And maybe I’ll give you a few little tastes of how Crowley achieves purest magic with nothing but the most elegant, graceful prose….